Vista's Graphics To Be Moved Out of the Kernel

Tiberius_Fel writes "TechWorld is running an article saying that Vista's graphics will not be in the kernel. The goal is obviously to improve reliability, alongside the plan to make most drivers run in user mode." From the article: "The shift of the UI into user mode also helps to make the UI hardware independent - and has already allowed Microsoft to release beta code of the UI to provide developers with early experience. IT also helps make it less vulnerable to kernel mode malware that could take the system down or steal data. In broader terms, this makes Windows far more like Linux and Unix - and even the MacOS - where the graphics subsystem is a separate component, rather than being hard-wired into the OS kernel."

Comments

The Bloat Divides?

[ackthpt]

So this is like cell division. The bloat of Windows divides into the Kernel and UI pools.

Taking this article into account, it seems clear why the massive graphics card requirement. However, if this much is being pulled from the Kernel, then why still such a massive minimum RAM?

"if you hold down ctrl+shift+alt and tap the backspace you can watch a video of steve wrecking a chair"

Re:The Bloat Divides?

[SquadBoy]

No. They get criticized for not doing features properly. My iBook with a lowly 1.33GHz proc, a mere gig of RAM, and nothing more than a ATI Mobility Radeon 9550 with 32 megs of video memory looks *stunning* and does things that from what we have seen so far Vista can only dream about.

The simple fact is that it's possible to do great graphics, at least for a GUI, without needing a bloody supercomputer (Yes yes yes I *know*. I'm overstating for effect). Basically if they did these things properly they would see a lot of the hating go away.

Re:The Bloat Divides?

[TheNetAvenger]

NT borrowed heavily from DEC VMS, which if it were running on DOS would be like running VMS on top of RSTS.

Just my two cents because I get sick of morons bloviating this crap...

NT borrowed almost NOTHING from the VMS or *nix world. Culter was author of VMS and a brilliant *nix designer, but he also knew the shortcommings of both OS models. NT was designed specifically to be different and not be tied to a *nix or for that matter a VMS architecture.

(In fact Cutler could have made NT a full *nix Windows, as Microsoft owned Xenix at the time, and was willing to go with whatever the Cutler team decided would create the next great OS architecture.)

People can bitch about Windows and specfically Win32, but there is not a whole lof ot NT itself that is flawed or attackable in its design. It is still doing kernel and architectual concepts today that you cannot find any other consumer level OS. PERIOD.

For graphics and sound to work best, commonly used objects are stored in memory, ideally most rapidly accessible by the chipset which makes use of it. If you can pre-load a graphics card with most of your GUI toolkit you can do some amazingly fast rendering.

Ok, this partially true; however, the thing people seem to miss is that when Microsoft dropped Video to Ring0 with NT4 it was to improve video performance for games, specifically WinG and DirectDraw at the time. This was a major performance increase at the time because of the higher level GDI calls of Win32 that were mostly non-accelerated for gaming. ALso at the time 3D accelerated Video Cards were basically non-existent at the time, so machines didn't have a powerful GPU to utilize.

And what this means by them moving the Video back up from Ring0 is of course more stability, so the new NVidia beta build doesn't make the Windows machine lock up when it shouldn't, as most graphic drivers are the root of 99% of all system lockups with Windows, since most users don't run MS certified drivers and are running the latest incarnations.

Additionaly, with the new graphics subsystem concepts in Vista, having Video Drivers in Ring0 is far less important, as the entire WPF is designed to take advantage of the Video GPU from everything from off-screen buffering like OSX, to drawing the entire controls and 3D interfaces.

In fact with the new WPF in Vista, the GPU can even be used to accelerate printing, and creation of XPS graphical/display documents.

So there is no longer a need or reason for the small performance benefits by having the video in Ring0, since the GPU, even older GPUs by today's standards handle all the gaming and now even the new UI controls and 3D vecotoring of the UI.

Basically MS is saying, we are moving to where the GPU will do its job, so we no longer have to compensate software rendering and no longer need Video drivers to have Ring0 access.

Microsoft considered this move with WindowsXP, but with the driver changes needed and the UI still being GDI+ based for most applications, there was still a lot of software rendering taking place. It was only the games that it really didn't matter for as they were already doing DirectX and OpenGL for performance.

My two cents....

(And if you don't believe my post, please go look this stuff up - do your own reseach and not follow the rants of myself or other Slashdot Biases. - Truly, I don't profess to know everything, and my rant is short, you will probably learn more by looking up the stuff I talk about than just reading my or any post and believing it without the poster's personal basis).

Finally, can I turn the GUI off on my server?

[ejoe_mac]

Who needs the overhead of a windowing GUI on a server?

Re:Finally, can I turn the GUI off on my server?

[nmb3000]

Who needs the overhead of a windowing GUI on a server?

Ah, yes. Just what we all want. Command-line administration of Active Directory and Exchange.

Windows Server 2003's GUI overhead is extremely small in comparison to the other tasks it's performing. Besides, it's not a matter of being "scared" of a CLI, in fact pretty much all the Windows sysadmins I know (including myself) use the Windows command line on a regular basis. Believe it or not, but a GUI really can give a boost to speed and efficiency when it comes to server management, regardless of what the zealots here might say.

Re:Finally, can I turn the GUI off on my server?

[Necrotica]

Ah, yes. Just what we all want. Command-line administration of Active Directory and Exchange.

Never used or seen Netware or used any UNIX, have you?

There is no NEED for a GUI on the server. Keep the admin tools on the client! If you can't administer AD from your client, restart the AD Admin Service on the service.

Admins should only physically touch servers when there is a hardware problem or network problem. If you are sitting on the console of your server using the GUI, I would suggest that you are not a very experienced sysadmin.

Re:Finally, can I turn the GUI off on my server?

[Gulthek]

Point: to make the GUI on windows servers optional.

Now for the marketing

[digitalgimpus]

You know when they market this you'll see it as

New! - Microsoft's Exclusive Patented Technology allows for graphics outside the kernel, to provide higher stability.

New! - Microsoft's Revolutionary Technology allows for graphics outside the kernel, to provide higher stability.

Just wait.... they'll make it sound like a new concept. Rather than a copycat.

Re:Now for the marketing

[NCraig]

This is just priceless.

Day in and day out, Microsoft takes a beating around here for putting too many irrelevant subsystems into their kernel.

And then, when Microsoft makes a positive design change, they are attacked for HYPOTHETICAL marketing. You don't know how (or if) they'll market this.

I can see it now: Bill Gates shows up at your front door, hands you a million dollars, and walks away. You run to your computer and submit the headline, "BILL GATES IS A TRESSPASSER."

Re:Now for the marketing

[UOZaphod]

Didn't you hear? Microsoft bashing is guaranteed karma, man.

Why would someone need to think of something original when they can just keep recycling the same old jokes over and over?

I'm no MS fanboy myself, considering some of the mistakes they've made in the past. However, I'm disappointed with what passes for humor here sometimes.

Open GL Drivers?

[Gr8Apes]

So, does this mean that MS's stated goal of "deprecating" OpenGL in favor of DirectX is now irrelevant? If the graphics subsystem is outside the kernel, it can be replaced by another driver that does not make OpenGL play second fiddle to DirectX. Perhaps this is a good thing?

Obligitory:

[mrwiggly]

Those who fail to understand UNIX are doomed to reimplement it. Poorly

Re:This is NOT a good thing.

[spitzak]

You seem to be confused. Yes there is still a kernel thing that talks to the hardware. Even in non-kernel X there is something in the Linux kernel that grants this process access to certain hardware. However you have to realize that this thing is TINY compared to a graphics server. Likely the difference in size is three or four orders of magnitude. Assumming bugs are evenly spread (which is probably false, there are probably fewer bugs than that in the hardware-talking layer), what NT (and X) has done is move 99.99% of the bugs out of the kernel!

Re:This is NOT a good thing.

[spuzzzzzzz]

But the vast majority of driver code lives in userspace; the size of the kernel interface is much smaller and therefore easier to debug.

Any bugs that exist in the kernel mode driver would yield the same problems in user mode. If a video driver incorrectly configures your graphics card, you're going to get a garbled display, period.

I don't think we're too worried about garbled displays here. If you have a kernel mode driver, it can do whatever the hell it likes with the entire kernel address space. Even if it isn't malicious, a badly written kernel driver can cause all sorts of corruption all over the place.

Ahum... NVIDIA userspace kernel module

[takis]

TechWorld is running an article saying that Vista's graphics will not be in the kernel. The goal is obviously to improve reliability, alongside the plan to make most drivers run in user mode." ... In broader terms, this makes Windows far more like Linux and Unix - and even the MacOS - where the graphics subsystem is a separate component, rather than being hard-wired into the OS kernel."

Yeah, running graphics drivers in kernel space is just plain ugly... Luckily for us Linux users, we can get full graphics acceleration by running the "userspace" NVIDIA kernel module ;-) Certainly increases stability!

size /lib/modules/2.6.12-10-k7/volatile/nvidia.ko
      text data bss dec hex filename
2476901 947920 6916 3431737 345d39